FEELINGS AND BELIEFS

T IS A COMMONPLACE of psychology that beliefs may be engendered by feelings. Unfortunately, in putting things so bluntly we run the danger of conflating different categories, both of “feeling” and “belief.” I want to explore two contexts in which there is, or at least there is asserted to be, a link between feeling and belief. One is the postmodern sociology of knowledge, and of science in particular. Here it is asserted that belief is always, or almost always, a social construction, and therefore to ask whether it is rational or irrational is beside the point and possibly meaningless. I contend that the mechanism invoked here, though rarely explicitly, is one that supposedly generates a “belief” from a “feeling.” In this case, the belief might, for the sake of argument, be one concerning a scientific theory or the relevance of an observation to the truth of the theory. The general tenor of the constructivist view is that one believes because the psychic pressures of the social context in which one is embedded force one to believe: bluntly, “A believes X because A is afraid not to.” In contrast, there is another kind of situation in which feelings are said to generate beliefs, one that assuredly does occur in the practice of science and of scientific medicine. This is the realm of intuition, where hunches, surmises, “gut feelings” are brought into play in a manner that undergirds beliefs, at least conditional, provisional beliefs. In a practical science like medicine, however, these beliefs may be the only ones available as a guide to immediate action. My aim is twofold. I want to assert that the first kind of mechanism, the one implicitly invoked by the constructivist, is highly problematical and certainly cannot be so commonplace or invariant in its effects as to account for the construction of something as self-consistent and reliable as a body of scientific theory. In other words, I assert that there are canons of rationality, that scientific theories adhere to these, and that the constructivist view of how scientific convictions are generated badly fails to account for this. On the other hand, I want to rescue science from the accusation that, since “intuition” or “hunch” or “educated guess” plays such an important role, science

T IS A COMMONPLACE of psychology that beliefs may be engendered by feelings. Unfortunately, in putting things so bluntly we run the danger of conflating different categories, both of "feeling" and "belief." I want to explore two contexts in which there is, or at least there is asserted to be, a link between feeling and belief. One is the postmodern sociology of knowledge, and of science in particular. Here it is asserted that belief is always, or almost always, a social construction, and therefore to ask whether it is rational or irrational is beside the point and possibly meaningless. I contend that the mechanism invoked here, though rarely explicitly, is one that supposedly generates a "belief" from a "feeling." In this case, the belief might, for the sake of argument, be one concerning a scientific theory or the relevance of an observation to the truth of the theory. The general tenor of the constructivist view is that one believes because the psychic pressures of the social context in which one is embedded force one to believe: bluntly, "A believes X because A is afraid not to." In contrast, there is another kind of situation in which feelings are said to generate beliefs, one that assuredly does occur in the practice of science and of scientific medicine. This is the realm of intuition, where hunches, surmises, "gut feelings" are brought into play in a manner that undergirds beliefs, at least conditional, provisional beliefs. In a practical science like medicine, however, these beliefs may be the only ones available as a guide to immediate action.
My aim is twofold. I want to assert that the first kind of mechanism, the one implicitly invoked by the constructivist, is highly problematical and certainly cannot be so commonplace or invariant in its effects as to account for the construction of something as self-consistent and reliable as a body of scientific theory. In other words, I assert that there are canons of rationality, that scientific theories adhere to these, and that the constructivist view of how scientific convictions are generated badly fails to account for this. On the other hand, I want to rescue science from the accusation that, since "intuition" or "hunch" or "educated guess" plays such an important role, science is ips0 facto irrational in the pejorative sense implied by the constructivist literature. 1 Let us explore the difference between feelings and beliefs. The vast majority of what we call beliefs, everyday beliefs if you will, are propositions that we are willing to defend if challenged. You have certain premises, which you can make explicit, and a high degree of confidence that others who agree with the premises and who have a chance to scrutinize your reasoning will agree with you on the point at issue. This doesn't end all arguments, of course. By invoking "premises," we open the door to indefinite regress, and even to questions of "foundational" beliefs. But in practice this is what rational discussion is about. One cannot believe (or, indeed, disbelieve) just because one wants to. On the contrary, belief must, by variable contributions of observation and persuasion, be earned.
Thus, as 1 propose to use the term, a belief is not just a proposition that is assented to in some haphazard fashion. Rather, it is a deep, intricate, and finely coordinated mental structure that bears the traces of complex inference. Characteristically, the scientific beliefs of scientists, pure and applied, have these qualities, and this is an important part of what makes them scientific.
Feelings, in practice, are different animals. Like beliefs, they cannot just be willed. One cannot be grateful or happy by dint of a willful act, any more than one can intentionally forget. Unlike beliefs, however, feelings cannot be justified from premises. Either a feeling exists, or it does not exist. You can persuade someone else to believe as you do through an examination of premises and reasoning, but you cannot persuade someone else to feel as you do, absent some predilection independent of the tools of persuasion. You can verbally induce somebody to feel something, at least with a high degree of reliability-"Your wife and baby just died in a traffic accident!"-but this is not persuasion, as it applies to supporting or changing belief.
Note that such common expressions as: "I guess," "I think," "I feel"-as was pointed out long ago by Gilbert Ryle2-can be understood not to represent an inner state of mind. Rather, they denote a certain hedge, a weakening of an assertion. "I feel that it will rain" is not a report of an internal mental event, but rather an overtly tentative step down from "It will rain" or "1 am certain that it will rain." We must beware of figurative language as well; "I like Road Warrior in the third" is not a report of affection. Also, we have to distinguish utterances from either beliefs or feelings. This is merely to say that people may make utterances that do not comport with their beliefs or their feelings. Lies are the most common instances, but the category also includes ironic comments, rote recitations, and playacting. Clearly, feelings may generate utterances that are not mere expressions of the feelings in question. If someone puts a gun to my head and demahds that 1 recite the Ruritanian pledge of allegiance, I probably shall d o so (if 1 know the words) because "I am afraid not to." Obviously, this will not correspond to a belief in me that Ruritania is supreme among the nations of the earth, nor to any feelings of deep nostalgia for the fields and woodlands of Ruritania. If the gunman then demands of me that I justify my stated loyalty to Ruritania, presumably I shall try to give utterance to such a justification; but this will be spurious in the sense that the purported justification will either invoke reasoning that I consider unsound or recur to premises that I d o not really believe (unless, of course, 1 really am a Ruritanian patriot).
Finally, we note that "intuitions," "hunches," and so forth deserve to be classed with feelings rather than beliefs for the primary reason that those who hold them cannot explicitly construct a justification for holding them from an adequate stock of premises and a compelling line of reasoning. This is precisely why there are special terms for them, distinguishing them from beliefs. You cannot persuade someone of a hunch, although you may possibly evoke a similar hunch in him. At the same time, hunches and the like are characterized by the same inscrutability usually acknowledged as such by the holder, that is associated with the realm of feeling. Note, however, that this is the way we treat such remarks. It is not, in itself, sufficient grounds for categorizing hunches, nor the use of hunches as "irrational" in any pejorative sense. How rational or irrational reliance upon hunches may be is a function of the origin of hunches and of the availability of sounder, timely guidance. About this we may make some reasonable guesses, as I hope to show.

THE CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW O F KNOWLEDGE
Let us consider a couple of points that come up in the work of Bruno Latour, since among postmodernist and "constructivist" theorizers about science he is as widely known and well regarded as any. In Science in Action he tells us "The fate of what we say and make is in later users' hands." Indeed, he states this as his "First Principle." This is a typical move-invoking an obvious tautology as though it were a profundity. But, to make a long story short, it comes as part of a strategy designed to make some highly contestable points. In Latour's view, as a general rule scientific statements: 1. Are often made from ulterior motives 2. Often have downright poor and incomplete justification 3. Are subject to inevitable vagaries of meaning and understanding because of changing historical and cultural contexts.
If this were so, we would have to concede that the Dark Ages continue and that we are fated to live narrow intellectual lives, necessarily confined to a body of observation and thought circumscribed by its time, locale, and language.
The contrasting and, I think, much stronger view is implicit in Galileo: "The secrets of nature are written in the language of mathematics."3 He was referring to the symbolic representation of relationships expressed as mathematics usually expresses them, in the timeless present. Here we have no tenses; we are dealing, as in logic, with rules and their sequelae, which are timelessly true. Thus, whatever inheres in the logical structure of the representations and the deductions that result from them is transferable across periods and cultures, at least in principle. In practice, this is near enough to the truth. We have no more trouble in deciphering Galileo's mathematical arguments, or Archimedes's for that matter, than those of contemporary mathematical physics-rather less, in fact. This is despite the fact that, unless we are specialist historians, we know very little about Galileo's ambient culture, and even less about Archimedes's. Moreover, the skill involved passes effortlessly to anyone trained in mathematical science, even if he (or she) is Peruvian or Papuan. There is no further need of acculturation to "Western" ways.
But the arguments of the constructivists fail in other ways than these. For they depend, essentially, on the view that feelings-in particular, feelings generated by social demands-can generate beliefs of the kind that scientists typically traffic in. Again, to telescope the argument, they assert, in effect, that a scientist believes a given belief "because he is afraid not to." Simply put, they assert that the feeling of fear constructs the psychic condition of belief. Let us see if this is at all plausible.
First of all, the historical example of Galileo gives us a prime instance of the kind of evidence that will not prop up the constructivist argument. Consider Galileo's famous recantation, an utterance made from fear if ever there was one. On the constructivist view, one ought to hold that, given the intense persuasive force directed at him by his society and its most powerful institutions, Galileo not only renounced his former heliocentric views verbally, but actually readopted the Ptolemaic system as a matter of belief After all, the pressures upon him were far more severe than anything experienced by the average working scientist; so, too, the feelings they evoked. Thus, the "constructive" power of his experience must have been exceptionally mighty! Of course, very few of us infer that Galileo, whatever his utterances before the Inquisition, actually changed his beliefs. History is against this. A belief is, as we have said, something more than the propositional content of an utterance. It is a whole system of justifications, prior beliefs, and potential arguments and lines of inference from those prior beliefs. "I used to think X; now I think Y" conveys much more than the assertion that X is false, while Y is true. In particular, if made in earnest, it means that the speaker is prepared to give a cogent account of the truth of Y and of the invalidity of the previously credited arguments for X. Now let us look at constructivism carefully. One's beliefs, remember, are not simply what follows the words "I believe." Consider the following sentences, quite similar as to grammatical structure, each purporting to explain something. This is an explanation. If it turned red for another reason, his belief is false.
If we change "he" to "I" and contemplate the speaker, we merely have an instance of someone applying a theory of causation (right or wrong) to an observed fact.
2. He believed it turned red because he suddenly saw a red reflection in the glass. This reports a belief and a piece of evidence for that belief. It is, of course, reasonable to believe that the color of an object changes if its reflection changes color. But the sentence itself is true precisely when it correctly reports the subject's thinking. There is no particular problem involved in grasping its truth conditions. If it turned red, but that was totally independent 1. He believed it turned red because of oxidation. of any red reflection, the sentence is still true. Again, changing "he" to "I" merely produces a report by an observant individual. Now consider another purported reason for believing: 3. He believed it turned red because he was afraid not to. Surprisingly, many of M. Latour's comments about "explicit interests," etc., fit this model. It may superficially resemble sentence 2, but there is no empirical or logical connection with the world of color here. Instead, there is an imputation of motive. Sentence 3 is about him, the "he" referred to in it, and in no way explains or supports anything's redness, insofar as anyone else in the world is concerned. Whereas in the prior case we too could well infer "redness" if we believed the subject's report about reflected light, nothing about his "fear" persuades us of anything.
Again, change "he" to "I." Now the insincerity is out in the open: his tongue spoke but not his heart. The explanatory form of the words suggests a relationship between the beginnings and ends of all of these sentences, separated by the word because. But in this case the relationship is set up between his saying something and his fear. An individual emotion-and-action is described here, not a generalizable rule or an observation about why or when things turn red. Doing something-here the act of making a statement-has been connected to its reason. This is like a motive or feeling, a reason for doing something, not something others can believe for the same or different reasons, like a prediction, observation, or opinion. Yet this is exactly what authors confuse who cite "ulterior motives" as reasons for believing (as opposed to saying that one believes)! Note that in 1 and 2 the belief (that something turned red) is connected with what follows (oxidation or red reflections). Yet in 3 the belief in redness is actually undermined if what follows is true-i.e., if it were "held because of fear." This is a revered maneuver of sophists: attaching irrelevant truth conditions to a given statement, thereby making the latter appear spurious. But here, as often is the case, the meanings of the words resist the form into which they have been forced: being afraid is not a good, not a mediocre, not even a bad reason for believing something has turned red. It is an impossible reason. Recall that one cannot believe (or indeed disbelieve) just because one wants to, any more than one can forget, or be grateful or happy by willful act.
One notes an intentionality about what one feels and what one says, that does not apply to what one silently believes. Many sophistic arguments fasten what one says to what one believes, attempting to convert agreement based on different premises into the seeming disagreement seen in oratio obliqua. Yet: "Socrates believed in the Forms because he reasoned that they were necessary," and "Plato believed in the Forms because Socrates taught him" suggests that they agreed, not that they disagreed.
Thus, while the contention "A said that he believed X because he was afraid not to" is unproblematical-it is the story we tell schoolchildren about Galileo-the contention "A believed X because he was afraid not to" leaves one with many problems indeed. What, precisely, is the mechanism for the construction of this belief, remembering now that a belief is not merely assent to an isolated proposition? How is "society" supposed to construct the apparatus, which, remember, includes ready recourse to a line of argument-often multiple lines of argument, in fact? If it is merely asserted that whoever adapted the belief absorbed, in some fashion, all the lines of argument that point to the belief, then it hardly makes any sense to say that "he believes because he is afraid not to." The notion that he believes because he has been persuaded by a certain line of argument makes infinitely better sense in this context. On the other hand, to assert that he believes something (in the sense that a scientist believes) without having at hand the rather elaborate justificatory mechanisms that warrant calling a belief "scientific" is fatuous. At best, he has acquired the habit of rote recitation of a proposition. This may constitute "credence" at some level, but certainly not "belief" in accordance with the everyday habits of scientists and other rational inquirers.
This being said, the constructivist is either left with no argument, or with an argument for something much weaker than what he really wants to assert. Of course, social factors limit the evidence available to an inquirer and direct his attention to one class of questions rather than another; this kind of "construction" is more or less universally conceded. But that beliefs, in and of themselves, with their necessary mechanisms of justification standing at the ready, are adopted in toto independently of internal logical coherence and with indifference to observable evidence, out of the need or desire to conform with some kind of shadowy social ethos, defies plausibility. It is doubtful that Latour or anyone else has ever seen this phantom "in action." The best evidence on offer, when examined, seems to stem from versions of the Galileo fallacy-that a compelled utterance is evidence of a compelled belief.

I N T U I T I O N A N D B E L I E F
As I noted above, an intuitive feeling-a hunch-cannot be a belief in the sense that a scientific belief is. To say it again, the very condition of being "intuitive" means that sufficient grounds of explicit persuasion are absent. Yet hunches and the like are often the chief guides to scientific research. It is not too much to say that no science could proceed, in a practical sense, without them. Even more, hunches, often dignified as educated guesses or disparaged as "gut feelings,'' frequently underlie the decisions that are made in medical practice as the basis for diagnostic tests and, in dire emergency, for vital decisions or "judgment calls." Hunches are, in short, grounds for action. This is often adduced as evidence for the "irrationality" of science and of the scientific community, as though this reliance on hunches was tantamount to the reliance of other cultures on belief systems that Western rationality decries as superstition. Is this comparison at all apt? In what sense is a hunch an "alternative way of knowing" like those so dear to the devotees of the postmodern?
Consider something that happens in the everyday practice of medicine, which I will call the "difficult case" scenario. A physician is having difficulty with a case. After the results of indicated tests have been analyzed and evaluated in light of the signs, symptoms, and history, the physician cannot diag-nose the patient or even determine a means of proceeding further with the diagnosis. Typically, a specialist is called, and, since medicine is highly pragmatically oriented, he knows which specialist to seek. He does not pause to savor the problem as a problem. In all probability the problem has, indeed, been solved before, but that is not of the essence here, nor is it particularly helpful; time, not the sorting out of scholarly priority, is what is of the essence. Why a specialist? What does that specialist have that the physician calling him in lacks? Almost inevitably, the answer given is "more experience." But of what advantage is that greater experience? Certainly, a bigger database has something to do with it; but most physicians would say that a significant factor, if not the most significant one, is intuition. Practically, this means making a decision, proceeding along a path that in others would be called "guesswork," and doing so, moreover, without being able to bring forth an explicit set of reasons for making that decision.
I believe that what the specialist physician does to "solve" a problem by intuition is to recognize, by some mechanism, the pattern that most likely fits the case, and to extend that pattern in time from what is currently known to what can be expected.
Two elements come into play. There is rational deduction, with facts being adduced, accepted theories brought consciously into focus, and the like. But this works in conjunction with intuitions and hunches that are not readily put into this framework. Why, then, is the specialist who works in this hybrid fashion trusted? Presumably, where "beliefs" are involved, the specialist could assure his colleagues of the rational grounds of his judgment, citing facts, studies, methodologies, and so forth, that fall within his particular ambit. But why trust his intuitions? Does this not carry us out of the realm of rationality? Not really, because part of the database of the physician and of his trusted colleagues is that so-and-so is a reliable specialist whose intuitions, whose "feeling" for cases of a certain sort, has proved reliable in the past.
Inevitably, there is some tension in such cases between the physician's real need to rely on the intuitive gifts of the specialist and his desire to have a plain line of fact and inference that can justify the guesswork. Yet nothing like "black magic" is involved here. We must note that these hintings and promptings and intuitions are not feelings like pain or giddiness. They have a cognitive content, and their import is directed to solving concrete problems, as they frequently manage to do. There are cerebral phenomena here, at times nonlinguistic, at times not self-conscious; but not, on that ground, necessarily irrational.
Recent advances in computer science, based on observations of actual neuronal function, as well as discoveries in mathematics may help us to understand what is involved. We certainly need not invoke emotion or irrational bias to explain it. Recall that artificial neural networks (ANNs), now a popular tool among computer researchers, perform functions that seem closely analogous to the intuitive judgments of human experts, including medical specialists. (Needless to say, they may do so without any knowledge, or bias, of race, sex, age, employment status, feelings, politics, or even their own future.) ANNs can pick up, analyze, and indeed begin to describe patterns far more elaborate and subtle than humans have been able to discern. In fact, by searching for so-called grandmother neurons one can actually identify correlations that were not suspected by the people who put the data into a computer file in the first place. Basically, these networks function by strengthening the predictive connections between depictions of (sets of) events that are observed to occur together. While humans are good at identifying one, two, or possibly even five causes and effects operating simultaneously, the ANNs can do so for fifty variables with no trouble at all. These are not to be confused with "rule-following'' expert systems. In such systems, the programmer provides a decision algorithm based on his own understanding of the factors involved and their interrelationships. ANNs, on the other hand, develop their own ''rules" autonomously, and it may well be that the human programmer who sets the system going in the first place will be unable to decode the "rule" that emerges in comprehensible terms.
The beauty of ANNs for our purpose is that they refine and clarify our notions of "intuitions." At root, it is simply a question of perceiving the relative strengths of repeating patterns and "going with them" as much as the facts warrant. I emphatically suggest that this may be one of the things that we commonly identify as "operating by intuition." If this is so, then intuition, as we may plausibly argue, loses its connotations of subjectivism and prejudice.
There may well be a psychological mechanism (or mechanisms) that provide us with cognitive rules and generalizations from experience of which we are consciously unaware, and which we find impossible to articulate or formalize. Nonetheless, the knowledge or surmise that intuition generates may be defended, in principle, as perfectly rational-no less so, really, than the beliefs whose roots in conscious inference we can trace. Thus, the fact that scientists exploit intuition in a variety of ways is no argument for asserting that science depends either on irrationality or the clairvoyant. Nor does it give any real comfort to constructivists, who might wish to argue that the "intuitive" is intrinsically more subject to socially induced biases and prejudices than is selfconscious reasoning. For one thing, the charge that the "intuitive" is inevitably contaminated by whim, emotion, or prejudice is seen to be dubious, at the least; for the cognitive sciences as well as computer models offer us paradigms of "intuitive" process from which these elements are clearly absent. Intuitive rationality, though its mechanisms still remain mysterious, & not an oxymoron.

CONCLUSION
The influence of cultural factors on thought and feeling is undeniable. The power of culture to dictate which facts we focus on, which conclusions we are most interested in, is all too apparent. Yet all facts are equally accessible to logic. The consistency of the principles of science is what holds science together. The characteristics of a society may hold its science together-for example, through practical respect for the scientific method, widely applied standards of measurement, a cultural commitment to free speech and telling the truth, and so forth. But in general the idiosyncracies of factious, polymorphous society are not part of science.
Wittgenstein remarked that "Philosophy arises when language goes on h~liday."~ We might say that postmodernism, in its various extravagant formulations-deconstruction, relativism, extreme social determinism-would have us put language-and science-on indefinite furlough. Under the postmodernist regime, there can be no confidence in data-based conclusions, because, it is held, language is incapable of bearing facts or of being used logically. Still less are we to trust reports of investigators; when they come from even the not-too-distant past, they are held to be "incommensurable" with contemporary thought.
Postmodernist understanding of statements and their truth leaves us paralyzed as regards predictions, for prediction depends on the truth of premises and on the validity of inference. If, as postmodernists would have it, meaning and truth are inexorably bound to context and historical setting, then the whole point of scientific theorizing would vanish, and science itself would have to be abandoned.
As I hope I have shown, the situation is not all that dire. The main thrust of the postmodernist assault on science is that its rationality is illusory, because what purports to be scientific rigor is helpless against irrationality in various forms. I have argued above that two of the chief props of the postmodernist critique-that scientific beliefs are mysteriously constructed by (unspecifiable) social processes, and that the reliance of science, and of medicine, on intuitive judgments ips0 facto introduces nonrational elements into scientific discourse-cannot stand close examination. The defenders of science have a robust and vigorous client. It is unlikely to melt away under any version of the postmodernist critique.